Red and yellow and pink and greenâ¦ Carey Marx has turned the rainbow song into a canny device for categorising jokes. And so, red is a warning generally leading to yellow, which equals nasty, pink is silly, green is for growers and blue denotes observational humour. It’s a system to help punters and critics understand the genesis of his gags. But why’s he bothered?

Well, last year Marx unwittingly caused controversy with his show, Marry Me, in which he set about a frenzy of dating to see if he could find a bride. The press had a field day, hounding the comic for ‘using sex for entertainment’ (huh? Think that one throughâ¦) and, worse, persecuting some of the women he dated. He also got a bit of stick for his 2003 show, Albino Hunter.

As in life, the colours serve as background. Marx is, in fact, offering a fairly straight stand-up set with playful visuals. He investigates the use of the c-word, deliberates drug abuse and has a pop at Uri Geller. There’s a very sweet video of Marx’s attempts to get an old folks’ home robot-dancing, and another where he gets random Londoners to jump through a hoop for no discernible reason.

The point his comedy spectrum makes is that comedians quite often get pigeonholed as one characteristic â nasty, cheeky, blue, whimsical â when actually, like the white of the title, the best ones combine them all. Marx? He’s a white knight in technicoloured armour.